Hello faithful readers. My name as you know is Bobby Powers, and I am a freshman at Notre Dame. I am in a contemporary poetry class which has assigned me with the task of examining poetry and presenting my opinions on this blog. As will become apparent, the most important aspect of poetry to me is a poem’s ability to entertain the reader. Whether it be by thought provoking psycho analysis or cheesy slap stick humor, a poem is only as good as its ability to captivate the reader’s attention. I personally enjoy poems which take on an original format or style, that introduce completely different outlooks on life, and that use humor as a device to entertain.
Excerpt from “i am unemployed”
By: Tao Lin
“- to be angry at the national book award people but to channel that anger into taking a hammer into the forest and attacking wild animals and smashing trees and wearing an owl suit and dropping out of tall trees like a real owl and screaming and mauling campers and smashing deer and paralyzing them and eating them alive and then I think that wait a minute, that seems wrong, is bad advice maybe; but then it seems there is a prologue to my nightmare and i watch it and enjoy it and it is horrifying and shocking and it is in pill form and i swallow it and it changes everything and it’s brilliant and i wake up smiling”
Tao Lin follows my golden rule of poetry in this excerpt: entertain the reader. The poem is both shocking and amusing and in a style of dry humor that is unique to Tao Lin. He utilizes an outlandish stream of conscious style in this poem that is accentuated by his lack of punctuation and informal grammar.
Using this style he is able to touch on some of the more basic human sentiments such as anger and frustration while embodying some of the more animalistic aspects of these emotions.
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